


The Soldiering Life

by Siria



Category: Stargate Atlantis
Genre: Gen
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2006-04-29
Updated: 2006-04-29
Packaged: 2017-10-03 19:30:22
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,586
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/21458
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Siria/pseuds/Siria
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Ronon was nine when his family sold him. They signed away his body, and his life, and their right to call him their son. In return, he received a new name, the promise that on the day of his fifteenth birthday he would join the Corps, and the large, sweaty hand of the local recruiter on his neck as he tattooed the military symbol onto Ronon's neck.</p>
            </blockquote>





	The Soldiering Life

Ronon was nine when his family sold him. They signed away his body, and his life, and their right to call him their son. In return, he received a new name, the promise that on the day of his fifteenth birthday he would join the Corps, and the large, sweaty hand of the local recruiter on his neck as he tattooed the military symbol onto Ronon's neck.

"That's barbaric," McKay says when Ronon tells them this one day, over a dinner of grilled meat and sauce in slices of bread (which Ronon likes) and thin, greasy things called fries (which Ronon finds disgusting). "How can any group of people with, with _any_ pretensions to being civilised sell their children into slavery at that age? It's bad enough that people are willing to sign up when they turn eighteen, but at least then they only have themselves to blame for their stupidity. How can any sane parent let their child become a, a dog of the military?" He waves a fry around on a fork to illustrate his point, heedless of the ketchup that spatters everywhere, bright red on his dark t-shirt.

"Dog of the military?" says Zelenka before Ronon can answer. He sounds as if he is edging from amusement at McKay's ranting into anger; Ronon knows, from what the little scientist has told him, that he had been forced to spend many years in the army of his home country when he was a young man, and that he didn't enjoy it. Zelenka has never gone into much detail with him about what happened, but Ronon knows from listening to the other scientists that it has something to do with the reason why he is so stiff and formal around the two linguists who come from an Earth province called Moscow, and why he's probably a better shot with a sidearm than any other scientist on the expedition.

The topic of conversation at the table shifts from Ronon's childhood to militarism and imperialism and why, of any country in North America, it's Canada that should be God's Own Country, Colonel, thank you so very much.

Ronon continues to pick at his food, letting the conversation wash over him and around him in a way that it hasn't since he was still a shy and gawky young boy in his first months at the Number One Barracks, too nervous to do more than volunteer his name when others spoke to him.

If McKay or Zelenka had stopped bickering long enough to ask him what had happened to him, he would have told them of how the ceremony of commitment was ceremonial only, and had been on Sateda for hundreds of years. His family had not thought of it as selling him, or as giving him away; nor had the military any thoughts of claiming or of training any child that young. He'd still lived with his family in their rambling house by the Auenlith River, River, three crumbling stone storeys set on a wide loop of river bank. He'd gone to school with his sisters and his cousins as he always had, and his mother had forgotten to call him Dex, _soldier_, as often as she had remembered. He hadn't learned anything more dangerous than the lists of the genealogies of the tribes, and the great works of the bardic poets until he was fourteen, and hadn't held a gun in his hand until he turned fifteen.

Perhaps it is best that they don't ask him, he thinks, swirling one fry around and around in the thin, oddly sweet sauce. Even if they were to ask him, he does not think he would be able to explain that he had not given anything away that day; he had gained a great gift in return.

* * *

"The, uh, hair thing," McKay says to him one day. They are both stretched out on the floor in the back of one of the jumpers, while Sheppard flies them home and Teyla catnaps fitfully. McKay's lying there because he says it helps his back; Ronon's lying there because he feels like it.

McKay stretches one arm up and back in the general direction of the cockpit, brandishing a half-eaten apple like a pointer. "I mean, I know why the Colonel's is like that, but yours I don't get. You're running from the Wraith for what, nearly seven years? Next to no human contact, constant fear, butchering wild animals for food and clothing, certainly no readily available hair product. So why the, you know." He pulls the arm back to wave vaguely around his head, takes another bite of the apple. "Why not just shave it all off and be done with it?"

Ronon stares up at the ceiling, considering.

He'd arrived at the Barracks with maybe a hand's length of hair hanging, glossy brown, all the way around his head, had looked up at the tall, yellow-stone building from behind a thick fringe of hair. They only allowed him a day's grace, two, to hide behind it, though; to walk around with his back to the wall, to look anywhere than at the person speaking to him, to mumble because of what he said and how he said it.

Then Sala, the woman who looked after all the new recruits with a ferocious kind of motherliness, had taken him in hand. Forced him down to sit cross-legged on the floor in front of her, stone slabs cool beneath him. She worked the wax into his hair, strand by strand, piece by piece, while she told him stories from the regiment's history, stories he'd known since childhood; he'd listened to her then anyway, leaning back into her solid warmth, the rich scent of the wax heavy in the air.

Sala told him of Caílte, the founder, who had said that the Satedans would be cattle no more, who had defied the charnel house stink that lay over the five provinces, who had organised the first armies. Of Danann, who had strapped her broken and dying body upright into her ship, so that even as her breath rattled and left her, and her eyes darkened, she could see her way clear to collide with the hive ship. Of Moreegan, who had screamed defiance at the Wraith across a battlefield made up of blasted and dying plains, who had led thousands to die, blown apart and irradiated and drained, so that thousands more might live.

When Sala had finished, hours later, she'd propped a mirror up in front of him so that he could see what he looked like; how the short locks that swung around his face made him look so very young, so much like a soldier. Behind his reflection, he could see hers; the long, black braids already scatter-shot with silver, the regimental marks ink-dark on neck and collarbone, the scar that puckered and wrinkled the skin where neck flowed into shoulder.

Ronon grew five hand-spans in the rest of that year; Sala died screaming the next. When he was finally allowed to pick up his pack and move his hammock from the trainee side of the barracks to that occupied by the specialists-in-training, his hair had grown long enough that it coiled loosely on his shoulders, down his back. Some of the others mocked him for it, just a little; it was a hair-style for old warriors, for people who lived in the past, who wanted to be like the ancient heroes more than they wanted to just be a good soldier.

Ronon had just snorted whenever they said things like that to him, laughter at him across the dorm or yelled across the rec room. He knew why he wore it, why it mattered. That was enough for him.

Still is.

He looks over at McKay; sees how the other man is watching him back with that kind of quicksilver curiosity which is so peculiarly McKay. Ronon shrugs, feeling the floor of the 'jumper dig into his shoulder-blades.

"I wanted to," he says, and steals one of McKay's powerbars, distracts him before he can ask any more questions.

* * *

Sateda had long been one of the richest worlds amongst all those linked by the Ring of the Ancestors, a wealth built up on a long tradition of canny trading alliances and rich agricultural land, and a much more recent tradition of strip mining in the high mountains above Difflina. The ore that came from there was a clean and extremely powerful fuel source, enough to make life easier on Sateda than it was most places in the galaxy, enough to give them weapons and ships powerful enough to make a real stand against the Wraith.

When Ronon joins the army, it is expected that he will spend most of his career in a cockpit or underground in a weapons station, helping to wipe out an enemy which would hopefully only ever appear as indistinct white dots on a radar screen, or never. The government and the council are certain that all this will help save them, that all their decades of advancements and effort will see them through the next Awakening, and they pour everything they have into funding.

The old ways of fighting and training are mostly forgotten, a waste of time; if you are manning a fighter against a Wraith dart, you are either winning or you are dead, and years of drilling in close combat skills aren't going to help. You don't stand on a battlefield with others; you fight with the help of your machines, and you fight alone.

Kell doesn't hold with this. A soldier isn't a soldier unless he is a warrior, unless he is a weapon, unless he is part of a team, he says, walking up and down the ranks, inspecting them closely. Machinery can fail, but a soldier shouldn't, couldn't, he repeats; and all of the infantry divisions under his command are known to be worked harder and longer than any other group in the forces. When Ronon is first assigned to Kell, he is as good as every other cadet in his group, a match to most others in the army. After two years, he is a Specialist, and can take down nine men with no special effort, with the smallest movement of his arm or pivot of his hips; after two years, he has the skills which will let him survive the last Culling of Sateda.

In the end, Kell is right. For all the advancements the Satedans have made, there is no way they can stand up to the concentrated firepower of two hiveships. Their guns and ammo work, but aren't powerful enough, most of the ships' drives can't take the strain of real battle, the planetary defenses crumble, and only the infantry fight on.

In the end, Kell is wrong. Kell is a soldier, but he betrays his team, sends his people to die and abandons his homeworld.

In the end, Kell is right. He makes Ronon a soldier, a warrior, a weapon, a part of team. He makes Ronon fit into Atlantis, makes him know how to fit with Sheppard and Teyla and McKay. He can fight alongside them easy as breathing, hard as living, easy as running, and it's the best kind of belonging Ronon knows. He taught Ronon how to step out from behind defences, from behind shields and armour, to stand facing your enemy equally and take them down; and when Ronon faces Kell, puts a bullet clean through him, no hesitation, he knows it's the best lesson he'll ever learn.

* * *

The motto of the First Satedan Army was this: _Truth in our hearts. Strength in our hands. Consistency in our tongues_. Ronon had never paid much attention to it; not while he was training, reciting it over and over while he moved his body through basic training, and not afterwards. Mottos were just words to be spouted by politicians, by the cowardly, by people who had forgotten why they were there in the first place or what their purpose was. He's never much cared what was in the hearts of others, once it wasn't hostile towards him; and the only consistent attitude he's ever wanted anyone to have was a consistent desire to kill every thing that had dropped from between the stinking thighs of a Wraith queen.

He concedes the strength thing, though, always has. Makes the killing and the not-dying part that much easier.

Sheppard snorts when he tells him this. They're both getting very drunk on cup after cup of the sweet, fiery whiskey that the inhabitants of P46-315 brew, lying on their backs on a balcony somewhere near the east pier. Well, to be exact, Ronon is getting drunk; the Colonel was slurring and hiccuping and grinning after only two cupfuls.

"'Integrity, service before self, and excellence in all we do'," Sheppard says, bitter-edged vowels warring with drink-smoothed consonants, hand gestures wide and expansive in a mockery of something Ronon doesn't understand but knows to be important. "Bullshit. 'S'all bullshit, you know, I, I," he says, right before he lets out an enormous yawn, jaw cracking, head lolling to one side, and he begins to let out small, snuffling snores.

Ronon smiles to himself, thinking suddenly of what Sala's reaction would be if she saw how little it took to knock out the Atlantean leader. She'd grin, call him a light-weight, mock him for a _lúdera_, an unfit commander, if he's not even able to keep pace with a second-rate recruit like Ronon.

Probably approve of his attitude to mottos, though, he thought, heaving himself to his feet. In his mind, Sala and Sheppard shared the same attitude to those in command, the same recklessness, the same sharp-white grin.

The main difference between them, though, he thinks, as he slides his arms under Sheppard's, hauls him upright and steers him in the direction of his quarters (apart from the fact that Sheppard's got the uncanniest luck of anyone he's ever met, while Sala screamed and screamed and fell apart as she died) is that though both of them spit defiance at the thoughts of rules and regs, there's still something perverse in Sheppard that clings close to them.

Sheppard's going to do everything he can to keep his people safe, fly suicide missions and take on impossible odds and fuck the consequences; smile loathing at his commanders and try his best to do his duty to them anyway; and Ronon's heard stories of what happened to the Genii who tried to take over the city.

The hallways are darkened as he helps Sheppard back, silent and still as they pass through the residential quarters. Atlantis knows him well enough by now that the door to Sheppard's quarters opens when he palms it, lets him in and allows him to arrange its favourite son on top of his bed. Sheppard mumbles a little, rolls over, presses his face into the pillow, and sleeps again.

Ronon stands there for a moment, watchful, before backing out of the room and letting the door hiss close. Another beat, and then he heads for his own quarters. Slowly at first, then faster as his feet carry him into the familiar rhythm of a run. His steps echo in time with the beat of the words in his head - _consistency in our tongues, excellence in all we do, strength in our hands_ \- and maybe, for the first time, he sees the point in them.


End file.
